What everyone is missing about the Keanu Reeves interview.
Forget the bit about NFTs and focus on what he says about real life.
This week in The Experiment, Keanu Reeves talked, and we said, “Whoa.”
As always, we recommend things to do (make this delicious seafood chowder), watch (Jane Campion’s excellent The Power of the Dog), and listen to (Lili Anolic’s Gen-X-athon podcast, Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College.)
But first, did you see the clip of Keanu Reeves laughing about NFTs?
Keanu Reeves sat down with Carrie Ann Moss with some guy from Verge magazine in a cross-promotion of their upcoming Matrix sequel and a video game company that has figured out how to create images of them talking with other avatars. In this case, 50-something Keanu’s voice came out of a 20-something Keanu. It didn’t have to be his likeness. This deepfake technology could make him appear like me, or you, or Joe Biden.
Most of the interview was about the fears and possibilities of technology that, to paraphrase the interviewer, blurred the lines between what is real and what is not. Most of the attention about the interview, however, was about the exchange over NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. It’s like buying a painting or a photograph, but this is a digital image, and you own it electronically. This is an attempt to create digital scarcity.
“What do you think,” starts the question, “about the concept of digital scarcity in things that can’t be copied…”
“…that are easily reproduced?” finishes Keanu before adorably falling over laughing with a delighted hee-hee-hee.
“But they’re not the same!” counters the poor interviewer, but he’d already lost the exchange. The 15-second-long clip went viral, an infection incubated in a conversation in one room and then spread over social networks, causing humans to fall even more deeply in love with Keanu.
The rest of the interview, however, flipped the paradigm. Where Keanu delighted in poking a hole in the NFT balloon, on most questions about digital reproduction he came down on the pro-technology side.
At one point, Carrie Ann compliments Keanu that he’s better-looking now than in his twenties but chases that with an apology for focusing on the shallow and superficial aspects of his looks.
“I dunno if that is shallow,” he says. “The idea of aesthetics and beauty is not a shallow place.”
“Your likeness could then be used for other things, though,” offers the interviewer. And that’s the crazy concept of this is that there could be digital versions of you as a performer that could theoretically be used in ways that are not you acting.”
“I think that’s part of what’s real and what’s not real and who’s the architect, who’s the director of the material,” said Keanu, who then says he made sure to secure the rights to his digital likeness in his performances so they can’t be altered without his approval.
And that’s when he got deep:
“In a weird way, too, we’re licensing our performances, too, with editing in the first place.”
“In a weird way, too, we’re licensing our performances, too, with editing in the first place. But I guess if you’re creating it, and by making that avatar, then do whatever you want,” he said, before turning to face his costar on the couch. “But then you could do multiple projects, Carrie Ann…”
It was a dizzying few seconds to see him realize that digitally altering a performance is an evolution from editing film (which are now mostly recorded digitally anyway), to then acknowledge that creating an avatar likeness of someone is then also a creative act and then realizing — hey! cool! — that one’s digital likeness capable of fooling the viewer could then be a widening of an actor’s career.
“You could just stay home,” said Carrie Ann, implying perhaps that while she read a book her avatar could go to work.
“You could just stay home,” agreed Keanu, affirming what she clearly meant as a joke, but her laugh struck a sad, falling note. Nothing about her body language shared Keanu’s excitement about the possibilities afoot. Actors, noted the interviewer, could perform at a younger age or when they retired. Or when they want to go to college, or spend real time with their children, or when schedules don’t match up and prevent the reunion of a treasured television show. (Though I think the Friends reunion is reason enough to destroy this technology and throw the pieces into the fires of Mount Doom.)
One’s digital likeness having greater capabilities opens up incredible possibilities. Imagine the new things that people whose activities are limited because of illness, disease, injury, or pain could do. There are incredibly talented people in the world who stay inside because of anxiety disorders. With this technology, they could still live productive lives while taking care of their pressing issues.
“I think that’s the whole thing about this world that’s becoming more and more real.”
This technology is also removing language barriers. They’re already working on using AI to make actors speak in different languages, which means the whole world will soon be able to see Keanu say, “Whoa” in the viewer’s language. Even more exciting, movies from the non-English speaking world will be accessible to English-speaking audiences without subtitles, which will expand many times over the film-going choices for American cineasts. And if they can do that, then someday each of us will have personal devices that allow us to be understood by anyone on earth, which is when I finally will be funny in China. (Yes, you Star Trek nerds. I’m talking about the universal translator.)
All of this, however, requires digitally altering Keanu’s face and voice so he really says “¡Guau!”
“I think that’s the whole thing about this world that’s becoming more and more real,” he said in the interview.
“So you wouldn’t need the actual physical experience of making it?” asked Carrie Ann. “It could just be done in a computer?”
“Well, it’s puppetry, right? It’s computer puppetry,” he answered as she turned away in dismay. “So then you could be wherever you wanna be.”
“Well, it’s puppetry, right? It’s computer puppetry.”
When we imagine having a greater existence in the digital realm, most of us react like she did. But she isn’t just the co-star of the definitive movie franchise about living a parallel digital existence. She’s also an actress whose job it is to pretend to possess talents and skills she doesn’t have and portray that fake person in a convincing manner in front of cameras that capture this existence, alter it digitally to construct a narrative, and then sit around at home while her likeness is portrayed on screens all over the world.
The difference between the analog world and the digital world is not a difference between real and fake. It’s a difference of medium in one world.
In fact, (he says — nay, avers, getting way too worked up about a Keanu Reeves interview — The Matrix is a story that exists to help people understand the fallacy that there is a division between the real and virtual worlds. We all think like Moss, defaulting to an understanding of the real world as one you experience corporeally and immediately. You are in a room having a conversation with another person. That is real life, we think. But we also pick up a device and press digital images created to resemble buttons on an analogue telephone. This device digitizes our voice and transmits it — frankly, I have no idea how this happens, now — through (fuck it) tubes or something to another device held by another person who hears your voice. This device masters the space part of the space-time continuum so effortlessly that the other person could be in the next room or in another country. And that this experience of a telephone call is so mundane as to never make you question whether it’s real life calls into question how radically technology has expanded our lives.
That a telephone call is so mundane that it never makes you question whether it’s real life calls into question how radically technology has expanded our lives.
Let me give you one more example and I’ll let you get on with your day: Recently I was in a music studio sitting on a couch next to a drummer named Z. He sat there like a languid fashion model, futzing about on his phone while he looked, frankly, stunning in his cream wool sweater and matching tennis shoes and knit cap. He was dressed for winter despite the fact that the temperature never dropped below 60 that day. Yee. See also: haw.
In front of us sat J, the engineer at the board. He had isolated the drum track in a song we were working on. So as the drummer sat next to me, we listened to him hit the snare with a pop over and over again in time. Pop. Pop. Pop. And every time the snare popped, the lines would shoot up on the screen, like an EKG of sound, creating little mountains on the engineer’s screen.
The goal was to make it sound weirder for some reason, so he isolated one of those mountains and shaved off the front and the backends, giving each mountain sheer cliffs on either side. Now the sound was more abrupt, less organic. It still sounded like a drum got hit, but now that was only a description of the sound and not a definition of it. The sound had been digitally altered and became something new.
Next, the engineer copied and stacked the sound in a slight stagger, making it sound like a whole bunch of drums being hit in time. And finally he did something to make the drum sound like a fuzzy electronic percussion instrument. It sounded like a drumline of robots was the rhythm section. Definitely weird.
The engineer looked over at the drummer and made his face into a question.
“Cool,” said the drummer, looking up briefly from his phone.
Now, what part of that was not real? And was any of that not real life?
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
How we’re getting through this
Hoarding cream cheese
Using AI to end subtitles
Making seafood chowder
Not watching the SITC reboot
Ruining parents’ Spotify Wrapped
What I’m watching
Benedict Cumberbatch is getting some Oscar buzz for his menacing turn in The Power of the Dog. Jane Campion is directing, which should be enough for you. It is Glen Weldon’s favorite movie of the year, which, c’mon people, should be enough for anyone. My friend B initially poo-poo’d it, doubting that His Lordship Cheekbones could pull off an American cowboy, but it’s the tension of someone of his intelligence and learning living as a cowboy that fuels his character. It was a remarkable movie even before the ending, about which I will say no more except that Campion lands the plane, and you will alight, blinking into the sun, surprised to find you were on that particular journey.
What I’m listening to
Going to do something a little different this week. I’m sure I’m not the only one to tell you about Lili Anolik’s breathlessly fascinating and fascinated podcast about the amazing collection of writers at Bennington College in the ‘80s, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and many more. Did you know one of their writing professor’s was an inspiration for the vain object of Carly Simon’s attention in “You’re So Vain”? Did you know it was Lethem who inspired Sinead O’Connor to shave her head? This podcast is the ur-text of Gen X literary genealogy. Here are some smart things to read up on it. But mostly this podcast makes me think it would be great fun to be friends with Lili.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds and have kept it off for more than a year. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.